New Books: David Rhodes's Driftless

As a writer enjoying a re-birth in popularity, David Rhodes is about as unlikely as they come. Before his 1977 motorcycle crash, which left him paralyzed from the waist down, he was considered one of the country’s most promising young writers. His new book is notable not only for the praise it has achieved, but because it takes place in another forgotten corner of the U.S. — the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, an area that many local fly fishers would prefer to keep secret. “The region’s peculiar terrain is due to its having escaped glaciation during the last glacial period. The term ‘driftless’ indicates a lack of glacial drift, the material left behind by retreating continental glaciers – something of a subtle and elaborate metaphor for the novel where people are relatively unmoved by the passage of time, the progression of modern society that seems to roll along all around them but never directly contacts their lives.” John Holt writes about Driftless (Milkweed Editions, September 2008, 352 pages) in the California Literary Review.Driftless on Amazon.